Tax cap widens gap between school districts

Disparity in spending per student compounded

Dec. 5, 2013

Second-graders pose with the mural they made of their school at Edward Williams Elementary School in Mount Vernon in 2009. Districts such as Mount Vernon rely heavily on state aid. Property-tax hikes don't go as far as in wealthier districts. / File photo/The Journal News

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Westchester is known for its high-quality schools, so it’s no surprise that 16 districts here are among those that spend the most per student in the state. But how much more could be a shocker.

An analysis released this week by New York State United Teachers found that the wealthiest 10 percent of school districts spend 80 percent more educating children each year than the poorest 10 percent. That was an average of $35,690 per child in the 2012-13 school year, compared to $19,823 for the lowest 10 percent.

Pocantico Hills was the only Westchester district that topped $35,690, spending $46,638 per student. Garrison, also in the top 10 percent, and nine of the 16 Westchester districts spent below $30,000, with the overall average inflated by a number of Long Island districts and small upstate ones.

None of the districts in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam are among the nearly 70 school systems in the lowest 10 percent, the report said.

The state’s annual cap on the property-tax levy only compounds the spending disparity, according to the union, which is using the analysis to bolster its case in an ongoing lawsuit challenging the tax cap.

The union wants to show once again that the property-tax cap “is just really one piece in a system of funding education that is so badly flawed that the issues of equity are tremendously obvious and what the tax cap is doing is basically building on that inequitable structure and making it worse,” said Richard Iannuzzi, president of New York State United Teachers.

Poorer school systems are more reliant on state aid — which is about $150 million less statewide than in 2008-09 — and property-tax hikes don’t go as far as in wealthier communities, the union said. The 2 percent tax cap allowed the wealthiest 10 percent of districts to raise an average of $704 per student in 2012-13, compared to an average of $114 per child in the poorest 10 percent.

Judith Johnson, interim schools superintendent in Mount Vernon, one of Westchester’s poorest districts, wrote in wide-ranging testimony submitted to the state Senate Education Committee last month that property-tax hikes have made up for part of the loss in state aid. “However, because of the cap on property tax increases, MVCSD can no longer depend on additional income from property taxes,” she wrote.

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New York State United Teachers’ analysis shows that as funding climbs, so do test scores in math and English. Between 18 percent and 21 percent of third- through eighth-graders in the poorest districts were proficient in those subjects this year, compared to between 45 percent and 49 percent in the wealthiest districts. Scores statewide plummeted this year because new, tougher standardized tests were given.

Five local school districts in the top 10 percent for wealth were nonetheless below the state average in English, math, or both — Bedford, Greenburgh, Harrison, Pocantico Hills and Tuckahoe. Chappaqua students were among the highest performers, with 70 percent proficient on the English exam and 71 percent in math. In Briarcliff Manor, 73 percent of students were proficient in math, second only in the top 10 percent to Fire Island, which had 82 percent proficiency.

Eleven of the 67 wealthiest districts are in Nassau and 19 are in Suffolk. The union didn’t provide data for the remaining 80 percent of New York’s roughly 700 school districts.

Greenburgh Superintendent Ronald Ross said his district isn’t wealthy. It has a lot of businesses, but more than 50 percent of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches. When it comes to building aid, however, the school district gets just 5 percent reimbursement from the state while Chappaqua, for example, gets 33 percent. The district is trying to convince the state Education Department to increase its reimbursement rate, he said.

The state hasn’t come through with all the education aid that would be required to fully fund school districts, Ross said. Each year districts receive less state funding than they are due in foundation aid, the state’s largest education grant. A “gap elimination adjustment” was introduced in 2010 as a temporary measure to help close the state’s deficit, but districts have not received all the promised money.

Last year, the poorest school districts received about eight times more total state aid per pupil than the wealthiest 10 percent, but they were 14.5 times poorer, said Rick Timbs, executive director of the Statewide School Finance Consortium, whose mission is school-funding equity. Property owners in wealthy districts pay a lot in taxes, but they get a lot more, he said.

“What you have here is poorer schools are struggling to keep even some modicum of required programs in place,” he said.

The poor districts have a preponderance of students who have special needs and aren’t native English speakers, Timbs said. It can cost 50 percent to 100 percent more to educate those children, he said.

The analysis does not include the Big 5 city school districts, one of which is Yonkers. They are heavily dependent on state education aid and their local funding is set by city governments. They also can’t levy property taxes.